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It's not the moving that I'm complaining about . It's the supposed format, basically not a real national championships at all. The format has been changed to so we don't have an overall Vets National champion anymore. We wil be split by age groups, so basically you can. E age group champion but not national champion so they can't call it the nationals anymore really. I'm in the 50-60's and want to fence and. Eat the 40's to 50's but really I want to beat the 60-70 who have won nationals a lot in recent years and even 70-80 with the likes of Brian Coulston and Graham Paul. To be National champion really is something to aspire to. I think the 40-50 will not bother turning up as they have nothing to qualify for and will only fence themselves.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill

The format has been changed to so we don't have an overall Vets National champion anymore. We wil be split by age groups.

There will be Vets who like or dislike this change.

I understand the Vets committee are making this change to improve the selection scheme as using the 'old' format, it was very much a luck of the draw in many age-groups of who would qualify for Worlds etc.

By splitting out the age-groups for the DEs it does make the older age-groups qualifications far fairer.

To get an overall Veteran's Champion how about this -

At the end of the split age-group DEs, the winner of each age-group does another DE, seeding based on poule results to find an overall Veteran's champion... Could that be the best of both worlds?

Obviously this will extend the event a bit, but may be a nice finish to the event.

My understanding, having spoken to Gillian, is that the scheme for next year has not been finally settled. Since the proposed scheme was announced I have spoken to a significant number of vets at the Worlds and Commonwealth. None of them thought that the new scheme was an improvement on the current scheme and neither did a majority of the committee members.
This scheme proposes 2 competitions run with 2 rounds of pools and then DE split into age groups, run over 2 days. For the pools all the 40-49 will be seeded above the rest, all the 50-59 above the older fencers etc. This will effectively produce a random seeding for the 1st round which will then also affect the composition of the second round. The seeding for the DE will therefore be fairly random and as only the top 2 qualify, the second best fencer will only have slightly more than a 50% chance of qualifying.
It will only be possible to fence in 2 events, and the timetable being so tight, the Saturday night dinner may not be possible. The attendance at the AGM may also be affected. We will be losing the most popular and successful vets competition, for a system and format that would appear to be inferior to even the current one. The only positive side I can see is that sabreurs who work will not have to take a day off.
A number of people including myself have proposed alternative system which will keep the national championship and I very much hope that we will still have a national championship in March.

We do use FT to run the BVF Champs and we used it for the ET16 in Medway in May.

If you use FT on a stand alone PC then live updates are easy, I agree.

For the 2 events above we had a FT Server licence and have 3 or 4 PCs connected to the server over a network. The server is connected by cable to a wireless router. The PCs running the competitions are connected by wire to the router. There are up to 4 remote PCs driving results screens getting the data over the wireless.

I tried for days to get live updates to work. I finally asked a network expert and he said it was not possible to do so in this configuration as it would open up a security threat to the FT server.

If you have achieved live update in a FT Server configuration then I would be pleased to hear from you.

PS your private message box is full.

Setting up live results in FT when using the server version works identical to when using a stand-alone PC. All you need to do is set one PC to publish the live results. I usually run a copy of FT on the server PC that does this.

Since the PC will be pushing the data to your website, it is not necessary to expose the server to the internet, so there shouldn't be a security threat from the outside.

If you have achieved live update in a FT Server configuration then I would be pleased to hear from you.

Sorry for a late response, I have been on an extended holiday after the Commonwealth Vets.

As Dan indicates all you are doing is periodically pushing data to your web site regardless of whether this is done from a standalone or server versions of FT. If there is any vulnerability then it is probably with the machine, associated operating system or firewalls rather than FT.

If you are are up in Manchester to run the tournament then I would be happy to come across and see what we can do. I have emptied my inbox so you can send me a PM.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.